● JUAN PABLO RAHAL

2020

Following UCLA’s 2020 New Wight Biennial, we made a catalog to accompany the online exhibition. Inside, one meanders through four rooms, getting lost amongst the works and the writing. Each section seeps into the next, forming a collective background that is always present in peripheral conversation, but never fully-aligned.

“ Matriarchy [ is defined] by an entirely different conception of life , not based on domination and hierarchies , and respectful of the relational fabric of all life.” Arturo Escobar

For designing the collateral for the CCA Fall Lecture Series 2020, I worked through concepts that could somehow represent my idea of what design is, and how I think it should be approached today— against patriarchy. Heavily inspired by the book “ Designs for the Pluriverse ” by Arturo Escobar, and thinking how to design a decolonized and matriarchal expression of design; I arrived as WEAVING as the concept to start from.

Weaving becomes a metaphor for design, its character of weaving different voices and mediums, and an opportunity to express each speaker as a thread—and the eight speakers together as a fabric, or CCA Fall Design Lecture Series 2020, and its respective logo. Each of the threads has colors and patterns that somehow represent each of the speakers. The fabric is also used later as a grid, the kerning of the letters is altered (defying the untouchables standards of European Swiss typography) , challenging the viewer to stop for a moment to read the text and composition.

Along with the fabric, another element throughout the collateral is the SCRIBBLE. This element also represents design, but in its ability for connectivity: through the scribble, the viewer, reader or player, can connect the different pieces of this puzzle and create by themselves, her/ his/ their own meanings.

Publication
2019

100 pages
7,75 × 10in
RISO and Digital Print

Selected as one of the best 50 covers of the year by AIGA, this 100 page publication aims to analyze the images that are built by Brazilian drag superstars Pabllo Vittar, Gloria Groove, and Linn da Quebrada, inserted in the context of Brazil, a country that has elected Jair Bolsonaro as a president.

Relating mainly with how pop and the internet have been a medium of expression, agents for the construction of our identity, and perhaps even a weapon to combat the patriarchy and heteronormativity. But by coincidence (or not), they fail (or not) and also give rise to fake news, WhatsApp chains, a country with the highest LGBT murder rate, a ‘gay conversion therapy’ law approved in 2017, and now a fascist president. 

Pop and the internet are egalitarian, pop and the internet are for everyone. Thus, pop and the internet could be looked at a knife that cuts on both sides and that is held by the victimizer and victim, that could be a tool and medium of resistance and/or propaganda. 

The publication a collection of materials that explain not why but how those realities are living in the same country and who are the public characters of these stories.

T-shirt
2019

Silkscreen
Printed on Cotton Fabric

This t-shirt was designed for the internal Compass Kickball Team. Inspired by soccer jerseys and the idea that they are this white canvas for different and multiple logos and brands that live on the same space — the t-shirt was designed quoting sports and commercial brands from the '90s and '80s. The design uses different logo iterations for the Compass Kickball Team and treats them like stickers that somebody would put on a skateboard, surfboard, window, or notebook. The main idea of the Compass Kickball Team is to have fun, so why not evoke our inner teenager for that?

Flag and Poster
2019

Printed Recycled Polyester
RISO Print

This flag is a collaboration with Simon Sepulveda. The flag is a celebration of diversity, Latin America, taste, and summer. Every fruit adds a different flavor to the mix, and that is what makes the tutti frutti so tasteful and color full.

The flag was exhibited at The Knockdown Center in Brooklyn, NY, during July of 2019.

Animated Illustrations
2019

The 80s and 90s saw the dawn of the internet and the connected age. The early aughts and teens brought an explosion of devices and digital. As we enter the 20s, we ask ourselves: What will this new decade bring?

https://www.frogdesign.com/trends2020

Performance, Workshop, Publication and Flag
2019

4 Booklets
1 Flag

Riso Print and Digital Print

MAPS OR THE MAP IS NOT (JUST) THE TERRITORY is built as a corporal expression workshop and performance. Here, the performance is also used as part of research—as a way to collect content and generate design expressions. The publications are a documentation of the event but also serve as a manual for futures performances.

Identity System and Illustrations
2019

The goal of this project was to make the Compass SF Bay Area brand more specific to its particular geography. What could SF Bay Area branding for Compass and its realtors look like? The deliverables were wordmarks, textures, and illustrations that would explore SF Bay Area landmarks, architectural styles, food, landscapes.

Publication
2017

4 Booklets and 1 Box
Digital Print

Deconstructing the moment that Juan Pablo ate an açaí berry bowl—açaí is a native berry from his country—in San Francisco, California, he creates, inside of a takeout box, a conceptual narrative for what the açaí berry bowl could mean to him and our current culture. 

Driven by imagery, these four books touch upon concepts such as homesickness (saudade), the properties of a berry as a product of consumerism, the historical imagery that a bowl (as an object) could carry, and the origin of a fruit bowl based in labor, capitalism, and colonialism.

Publication 2019

42 pages
7,75 × 10in
RISO and Digital Print

Installation
2018

Projection, Poster and Brochure
Digital Print

Climate Countries is an installation that aims to raise questions about the future of our borders, politics, currency—and ultimately—climate. 

The installation happens inside and outside of a space. Outside the audience is informed, through a poster and audio, how this future that they are about to enter will be. Inside, a completely different atmosphere is presented, representing three different scenes of this future. These three scenes are built through the projection of a small animated poster that interrupts the daily routine of a persons’s day in a different and new country—people will need to adapt their life in order to be a citizen of this new countries.

Identity System and Packaging Design
2017

Box, Booklets, Posters, and Objects
8 × 12in
RISO, Digital Print, Die Cut, and Aluminum Dye Sublimation

An identity system and package design for representing and experiencing a commemoration of a speculative future landmark, Rodinia Tunnel. The identity system is expressed through the folding box that serves as a portable museum, made with the intention to invite those that receive the box to revisit their journey of the Rodinia Tunnel, guided by different graphic materials.

Rodinia is a tunnel that connects South Korea and Japan. A tunnel that rethinks borders as a space of connection and meditation.

This envelope/box is a portable museum that celebrates its 18th anniversary and is made with the intention that those that received it, would have the opportunity to revisit their journey through its different graphics materials as letters, posters, books, and cards. 

Posters
2017

RISO and Digital Print

Exercises In Style by Raymond Queneau retells Queneau’s short tale ninety-nine times, taking ninety-nine different positions as an author. This is a series of posters for the narrative section “Dream ”, that tells a “misty and nacrous” story when Queneaus saw a strange young man on the bus.

Photograph, Concrete Plaque, and Website
2019

Since their construction in the 1960’s, the Cabazon Dinosaurs have animated both the physical space of their surroundings and the pop culture space of the film and multimedia they’ve inspired. Some visitors happen upon the dinosaurs circumstantially, while some seek them out specifically for the photo op. Spectators’ obsession with this site reflects a contemporary preoccupation with the simulacrum, as a projection of our desires. The Cabazon Dinosaurs Plaque aims to distort the distinction between fiction and reality. A physical and digital plaque that tells a different version of the story, it distorts not just the dinosaurs’ history but our human history as well. The Cabazon Dinosaurs Plaque proposes a world where the origin of life resides in the USA. What is reality and what is fiction?

Posters
2017

4 Posters
Digital Print

This series of posters was created as an investigation into Sol LeWitt’s restrictions methodology, focusing on one of the sentences from Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969) as content and starting point. 

"The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course." Sol LeWitt

Identity System
2017

Booklets, Posters, Stationary
Digital Print

Passaporte is a portable and circulatable art gallery in the form of series of passports that are constantly traveling and connecting people around the world through art. 

Passaporte celebrates the cultural diversity of the world through the method of comparison: Within each passport is not access to a country, but a universal and cultural concept—food, sex, immigration, evolution, ethnicity, babies, ecology, religion, shopping, sports, traveling, heaven. 

The stamps of these passports are not regular stamps, but the representation of those specific cultural concepts, through the lens of different artists from different countries, backgrounds, cultures. 

The passport holder of each passport will always be a citizen of the world's culture, holding the passport in their hands in that moment.

Poster and Manual
2017

Digital Print

Posters
2017

Digital Print

A series of posters made for the 2016 Brazilian–French film, Aquarius.

Identity System and Exhibition
2018

<span> is a collated exhibition that covers three distinct sub-domains: SURVEILLANCE, IDENTITY, AND TERRITORY;

<span> is an exercise in applying the code-logic of digital syntax to physical space, and vice versa. Digital artifacts will reveal themselves only to those who dare to interact with their referents: physical process objects, castoffs, prototypes. Like the <span> tag in HTML code, each individual project within a sub-domain adds situated meaning and specificity to its parent.

For this project, I work along with my classmate, Jenn Jiang, to co-design the identity system of the exhibition.